Special Physics Seminar

First Measurement of Electroweak Vector Boson Scattering and Potential for New Physics Discovery at ATLAS

Jessica Metcalfe

Brookhaven National Laboratory

The announcement of the Higgs discovery in July 2012 was a monumental achievement for High Energy Physics. Even if the recently discovered boson turns out to be the Higgs boson, its role in electroweak scattering of two vector bosons (V= W,Z) still needs to be experimentally established to confirm the SM nature of EWSB. Electroweak vector boson scattering was measured for the first time by ATLAS in the same (electric charge) sign WW (ssWW) channel. For future runs of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, this channel will also be a rich place to look for new physics via the anomalous quartic gauge couplings (aQGC) in an Effective Field Theory. The first measurement of electroweak VV scattering in the ssWW channel and the limits on aQGC with center of mass energy of 8 TeV with the ATLAS Detector at the LHC will be presented, followed by a look at the potential prospects for discovering new physics in the ssWW channel for the planned High-Luminosity LHC.